U A E
Asian Workers Shape Society, but Market Changing
by Peyman Pejman
DUBAI — When the United Arab Emirates was formed in 1971 by patching together seven independent "provinces", the country was not much more than a desert land. Nowadays, the country is a modern, clean, technologically-oriented state marveled by much of the Middle East.
But the natives of this country can claim little more than providing leadership and paying top dollars for what the UAE has become. The actual work of building this country has been provided by millions of immigrants and migrant workers, many of them from Asian countries.
Of the total population of about 3.8 million, the natives — called Emiratis — constitute a meagre 18 percent.
The largest group of non-natives is from India, whom according to their consulate here, account for about 1 million. Other large Asian "minorities" are from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Philippines.
UAE leaders say they are fully aware that making the country what it is today has come at a cost.
"Looking at the growth that took place and looking at the infrastructure facilities that we see now in Dubai, the fast growth that we experienced in such a short time is phenomenal," Ahmed al-Banna, deputy chief of Dubai's chamber of commerce told IPS.
"So probably there was a price to pay and the price was the misbalance in our population between the national population and the foreign population," he adds.
Dubai has become the jewel of the UAE, if not the entire Gulf region. Occupying only five percent of the country's land, it handles 70 percent of the country's total imports, of which 65 percent is re-exported to other countries.
"The only thing New York City has that Dubai does not, is crime. We are competitive in every other aspect," Lubna al-Qasimi, perhaps the most leading UAE businesswoman, told IPS.
The composition of that foreign population has changed almost as much as the UAE itself has. But UAE leaders say the reliance on certain types of foreign migrants could well diminish.
"We had to have unskilled labour to assist in building the infrastructure. But with the completion of the major infrastructural facilities, with the technology growing, it will make us use technology more than unskilled labour," says al-Banna.
That could be bad news for immigrants and migrant workers from some countries.
While technically all emigrants and short-term migrant workers are equal in this country, it is all but an open secret that some nationalities have more respect from local authorities and even from their own Asian compatriots.
"There is no doubt that, for example, there is a difference in this country between an Indian and a Filipino citizen on one hand, and someone from Sri Lanka and Nepal on the other," says an Asian diplomat who asked not to be named.
Y K Sinha, India's consul general in Dubai, says he has seen the shift in the calibre of people from his country coming here. "Earlier we used to get a lot of unskilled labour. But gradually there has been a shift. With the Indian economy improving and liberalising in the last 10, 12 years, the people who are coming in are more educated, semi-skilled and skilled," he says.
He says although the majority of the four million Indians living in the Gulf are blue-collar workers, the percentage of business people, and computer skilled workers in the UAE, and especially in Dubai, is considerably higher than in other places.
Foreign diplomats and some UAE officials say other Asians, such as Sri Lankans and Nepalese, have been less able to cope with the changes in the local labour market.
Whereas Indians, in part because of longer historical association with the UAE, have entered deeper into the business and commerce layers of the society, Nepalese and Sri Lankans are still — perhaps unfairly — characterised as "cleaners and maids".
That, in effect, has created a class system within the Asian community itself.
Raju, a 20-year-old Nepali who works in Dubai as a cleaner, says he and his people do not have much opportunity to mingle with Asians from some other countries. "First of all, we get paid a lot less than others like some Indians or people from the Philippines. Also, some of these people have been here much longer time so they have become more part of the society than we have," says Raju, who asked his last name not be mentioned.
But the class differentiation is perhaps more along the economic strata than nationality — just as it is within many other countries.
"You cannot really say Indians are treated differently from Sri Lankans," says one Indian computer specialist. "What would be fair to say is that because there are more educated Indians than from some other country, those particular Indians may have it better. Even within the Indian community here, there are people who don't socialise because they are different from each other."
The question, he says, is whether the economic gap within communities from other Asian countries is as wide as it is from India. Many here argue that the answer is no.
But attitudes toward Asian workers here also depend on in which of the seven emirates in the country they work. While Dubai is more cosmopolitan and accepting of various nationalities regardless of their jobs or education, more conservative emirates, such as the capital Abu Dhabi, are more class-conscious.
But the debate about the role of the migrant workers in this country goes beyond the question of unskilled versus semi-skilled or how many years of college education the visitors have.
It goes to the root of what culture the UAE wants to have and whether it can continue to claim to have a culture when the natives are a distinct minority in their own homeland.
During the country's National Day on Dec. 2, UAE's leader Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahyan in effect said the country should not allow its culture to be determined by the influence of the foreigners.
Various other UAE officials have called on the government to establish a policy that would require increased childbirth. The cabinet has established a committee to study various options and reports back to government leaders.
Al-Banna of the chamber of commerce says while he believes the UAE will continue to rely on foreigners for the foreseeable future, it might just be that those foreigners will have to be more investors than domestic workers. (END/Copyright IPS)
